Server and Tools Chief Nadella Stumps for a Microsoft Hybrid Cloud

Microsoft Server and Tools President Satya Nadella pushed his company's hybrid cloud efforts to investors at this week's Citi Technology Conference, held in New York City.

In a speech yesterday, Nadella said his department's focus is for enterprises to adopt multiple Microsoft technologies that will provide a hybrid public/private cloud solution. "Our mission, simply put, going forward is to cloud-optimize every business," he said.

There will be a fundamental shift in the technology that governs enterprises, and Microsoft has hopefully found what this shift will be, Nadella said. "As I have gone out and talked to CIOs, as well as ISVs, it's very, very clear that the world of IT is going to be of hybrid IT that's going to span public and private clouds. So, our job No. 1 from a Server and Tools Business is to make sure that we have the core operating system and data tiers available across public and private cloud."

Satya Nadella, president of Microsoft's Server and Tools Business.

Nadella said that the hardest challenge in bringing about this change in IT models is to get the enterprise on board early. However, he said that Microsoft's brand, on its own, will make it easier for many to take the plunge: "Anytime you see a massive shift in distributed computing, identity becomes the core way to manage that complexity."

Laying out Microsoft's strategy for this approach, Nadella commented on how current and future versions of Windows Server and System Center will be powering the private cloud section, while application-based hosting duties provided by Microsoft Azure fulfils the public cloud component.

Helping in the transition, Nadella said, is the fact that most shops already employ different elements that make up Microsoft's public and private cloud strategy. On the private side, he pointed out that there is already a huge install base for its multiple System Center products, and most of the servers on the market today, including 75 percent of Intel servers, contain Windows server elements.

As for current public cloud adoption, Nadella spoke optimistically that those jumping to Office 365 will help in transitioning more applications to a virtual workspace. "With Office 365, we now have a fantastic effect where every 25 seconds we are adding a new customer to Office 365. And, in many, many cases, those customers are first-time users of server products," he said. "And so, that's a great reinforcing effect for us even on the public cloud side."

Nadella added that he is hopeful that this migration to the online-based Office 365 will ease the development of custom apps that can transition from Office 365 to Azure, and vice versa. "That's really the core to what we want to achieve in the immediate term with the public cloud. It is to really facilitate getting these two flywheels going in concert, because that's what's going to cause enterprise ISVs to really come onto Windows Azure."

While he said that future updates to Azure and upcoming versions of products such as System Center 2012 and SQL Server will simplify this targeted hybrid environment, he did not provide new details. However, he did reiterate multiple times that Microsoft will be unveiling new info next week in Anaheim, Calif. during its Build conference.